The Invention of the Land of Israel - Shlomo Sand

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German dialects—the region in which one’s home was located, in which children were born and raised, and in which the extended family continued to live.

      Kings and princes employed the term differently. Elite segments of society applied the concept to a variety of political entities, turning kingdoms, dukedoms, earldoms, and jurisdictions of taxation and judicial activity into “homelands.” The papacy also did not refrain from making use of it, periodically calling for the rescue of the home-land in order to defend Christian harmony and the security of all the faithful.

      Typically, the willingness of knights to die was a sacrifice on behalf of either the feudal lord, the Church, or, later, the king and kingdom. The formula pro rege et patria (for king and country) grew increasingly popular in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and would survive until the modern revolutions. But even in the more organized kingdoms, there was a persistent tension between loyalty to the heavenly homeland and loyalty to the national identities that were always subordinated to hierarchical structures. In addition, the military ethos of premodern European societies encompassed devotion to the homeland in the form of substantive values such as honor, glory, and appropriate financial remuneration for one’s willingness to sacrifice.

      Nor were the evolving absolutist monarchies capable of producing the expressions of loyalty and the willingness to sacrifice for the sake of the homeland that would become familiar after these monarchies’ demise in the late modern period. For example, let us consider Montesquieu and Voltaire. These eighteenth-century thinkers clearly understood why kingdoms were not perceived as homelands, and explained it to their readers. In his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu, who possessed broad historical knowledge, asserted:

      Voltaire, whose historical knowledge was as broad as that of Montesquieu, addressed the value of “homeland” in his witty Philosophical Dictionary of 1764:

      In fact, though incisive in their analyses, both thinkers were firmly rooted in an era on the verge of vanishing. They were quite familiar with the term’s application to the relationship between people and their places of birth and the areas in which they grew up, but had no way of knowing that this array of personal mental connections would be transformed and transferred to broad political structures. The monarchies established on the eve of the modern era lay the foundation for the rise of nationalism by setting into centrifugal motion the administrative languages that would soon emerge as national languages. Most important for our discussion here is the fact that, though lacking the territorial sensitivities that would accompany the rise of national democracies, they began to draw what, in some cases, would become the future borders of the homeland.

      Both Montesquieu and Voltaire were liberal pioneers and consistent and courageous advocates of human freedoms. However, both men also exhibited a clearly antidemocratic temperament; they had no interest in the illiterate masses as political subjects and thus were incapable of imagining mass collective identification with a kingdom or political homeland.

      It is no coincidence that the first theoretical patriot to emerge from the European Enlightenment was in many ways also its first anti–liberal democrat. Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not address the concept of homeland in a systematic manner and found it virtually unnecessary to clarify his intended meaning when he made use of the term, as he did abundantly. However, some of his writings contain explicit exhortations to preserve patriotic values, employing rhetoric more characteristic of modern statesmen than of eighteenth-century philosophers.

      In his moving “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva,” which he wrote in 1754 and used as an introduction to the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality between Men, he already explains the kind of homeland he would prefer if afforded the ability to choose one for himself: